


London Bridge

by Bibliotecaria_D



Series: Footnotes: Sand Box [4]
Category: Transformers Generation One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-20
Updated: 2012-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-29 20:23:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliotecaria_D/pseuds/Bibliotecaria_D
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Come play in the sandbox.</i>  (Falling down, falling down.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	London Bridge

_Come play in the sandbox._ (Falling down, falling down.)

 **Title:** London Bridge  
 **Warnings:** Ratchet sees things a little differently than commonly thought. Rewriting a fearsome reputation, with a twist on how exactly it came about.  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Continuity:** G1, _Footnotes_ AU  
 **Characters:** Ratchet, Decepticon and Autobot flyers  
 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn’t own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.  
 **Motivation (Prompt):** _”Collapse,” and annoyance at the fanon interpretation of Ratchet as an abusive slagger who doesn’t respect his patients or his tools._

 

[* * * * *]

Ratchet was a reasonable mech. He’d been promoted through the ranks steadily, building a stable reputation of being able to handle anything. He’d been made Chief Medical Officer because of a combination of experience and competence, layered over with toughness developed out of the natural stubbornness he’d been created with. And he needed every iota of that stubbornness to be a medic in the midst of war.

War did a lot of things to a mech, but it would not turn this medic into a killer. He’d gone toe-to-toe with Prowl and Ironhide over that more than once, flinging his ethics into battle beside more ruthless Autobots but holding his moral ground. If the Autobots as whole decided to abandon their ideals, would he follow them over that edge? No. The medbay and a medic’s hands could, and would, remain the one place in this civil war where sanctuary meant something.

He’d disable. He’d cripple. He’d fight to the bitter end to save a fellow Autobot – _or any patient_. When it came down to the final blow, he neither aided nor abetted. Ultimately, stripped down to the core, the foe he fought didn’t care about faction, and he’d fight just as hard to save a Decepticon from it.

Prowl remained unhappy with his personal choices, but tactics and ‘the reasonable solution’ often didn’t allow for compassion. Medics had to allow for it, and so the realm of the medbay remained safe from logic’s tyranny under Ratchet’s guardianship. Ironhide was more vocal about his disagreement, but a few well-scheduled ‘routine’ maintenance checks reduced the red Autobot to grumbling instead of shouting1. Optimus Prime, of course, had nothing but respect for Ratchet’s decisions. The Prime truly believed that freedom was the right of all sentient beings. It was horribly naïve of him, but Ratchet knew what the repression of personal belief could lead to. Even Ironhide and Prowl only objected because they feared Ratchet’s personal brand of idealism would eventually get him killed.

Red Alert was another story altogether. Ratchet spent regular intervals yelling back and forth with him through the communications system on the _Ark_. It was _Security Issues_ versus _Medical Ethics_ argued out in the courtroom of a civil war. They engaged in a priority one battle royale that provided questionable entertainment for the other Autobots. Neither side was willing to compromise. They often spent days at a time firing verbal shots across each other’s bows in the corridors and retreating in opposite directions. Officer meetings were strategic exercises in sniping from moral high ground into the heavily armed area of security regulations 2.

It wasn’t that Ratchet couldn’t understand Red Alert’s concerns, as overblown as they sometimes seemed. He could understand why Prowl and Ironhide and Jazz and Prime worried, too. The point, however, was that he _could_ understand.

The other Ark officers, by necessity, dealt only in black and white. Jazz, as head of Special Operations, had to be able to hide in the black by pulling it over the white; it became his camouflage. As a tactician, Prowl had to see both sides clearly; logic distanced him from them equally. Ironhide sat firmly in the white and shot big guns at the black. Red Alert set up barricades and patrolled with rigidly controlled paranoia between the lines, just in case black made a move on white. Prime had to offer an open hand to the black while defending the white; he had the seemingly-impossible job of trying to be fair in the midst of war.

Ratchet stayed determinedly in the shades of gray, refusing to let anyone separate the factions that cleanly. In civil war, there were no pure shades: no unsullied white, no untainted black. There were traitors and unwilling participants, civilians and warriors, but no one could divide Cybertron into good and evil. That was an artificial belief as fictional as a gun manufactured for peace. Believing in a good cause didn’t make friendly fire a better thing, nor did evil intentions mean there was no kindness between enemy soldiers. The other Autobot officers had to see only black and white, had to believe the lie of perception, or they’d be forced to see the truth of fighting their own kind. For the sake of the other officers who couldn’t, Ratchet had to see the grays.

He had to see that some Decepticons enjoyed killing, but that the majority of them actually believed. They really, truly believed that what they fought for was right. They were soldiers, yes, but they were also mechs as devoted in their own way to following Megatron’s vision as the Autobots were to following Prime’s beliefs. Different societies sprout different rules, wildly diverse ethics, and morals as varied as the mechs who held to them. Culture, even the twisted kind within the ranks of soldiers, was the source and result of the mechs who lived within its bounds. Cybertron had been divided for so long that Decepticons and Autobots had achieved a false dichotomy, unable to see their underlying similarities for the surface differences. So long as those differences met on the field of battle, the only result could be civil war.

There had to be a place where safety could be found. There had to be a neutral zone where similarities were rediscovered, and all the damage of internal combat repaired.

Ratchet had to see it. He had to know it. And, as a result, he made his medbay that place.

He was a reasonable mech, however, and tried not to let his peculiar system of thought spread much beyond close subordinates. Cliffjumper already accused him an average of once a week of collaborating with the Decepticons. It would do Autobot moral on Earth no good if the CMO started talking slag about fundamental beliefs and the philosophy of life. Inside his medbay, it was a different story. It was a quiet, stable resolution he’d made upon promotion, establishing that boundary. Any mech could walk in to his territory and expect to be treated as a patient. It was a small place, but pushing it further than his own hands — or in his case, his own medbay, that small realm within the larger Autobot faction -- was more than a reasonable mech could expect. And Ratchet was a reasonable mech.

Reasonable, yes, but not perfect. Ratchet had been pushed a lot over time. It was war; it happened. He’d been verbally and physically attacked, his beliefs as an Autobot and a medic brought under constant fire, but he’d bulled through the worst of what other could do to him with the steadfast belief that what he did was right. It was for the benefit of peace, and the eventual healing of the people of Cybertron.

So to have the cease-fire broken within a medical bay he presided over, Decepticon and Autobot jets brawling with absolutely no respect and no consideration _right in front of him_ , as if every time he went under the guns for the sake of their future _didn’t matter_ …

Well. Ratchet had been a reasonable mech for a very long time. No one could blame him if, just this once, he acted a little unreasonable. A tiny bit of violence, just this once. This time, and only this time, he’d thrown a few tools around the medbay. They were all borrowed from Shockwave, anyway, so he hadn’t damaged anything important. He’d raised his voice, but it was completely understandable considering circumstances! A mech, even an Autobot, even a medic, could only be expected to tolerate so much. Even Ratchet had his limits, right?

Given a few days, nobody would remember his tiny snap. The Aerialbots were irrepressible on bad days and boisterous to the point where he wondered if they suffered from short-term memory loss on good days. They’d blank out his short loss of control the minute they walked out the door of the medbay, his orders to not get damaged out of inter-faction stupidity _or else_ forgotten by the time they got to the landing field. The Decepticons were Decepticons. They probably couldn’t pick him out of a line-up of Autobots later today, much less remember how he’d described in graphic detail what he’d do to the next flyer who got out of his assigned repair berth without prior approval 3.

Okay, sure, so Thrust had saluted him about 15 times in a row and started tacking _‘Sir!’_ onto every sentence. And yeah, Fireflight had actually hidden under his berth instead of laying on it. Skywarp had automatically teleported back into the medbay after the first initial escape attempt by the pack when Ratchet had turned his back, but that was reflex conditioning. He was fairly sure it was left over from being bellowed at by some other medic. A Decepticon medic. Yeah.

The others had straggled back in shamefaced, too, but the Aerialbots had the chain of command making them obey his orders. The Decepticon flyers had clustered tightly by the door until he reached for a welding torch, whereupon they dove for the berths like salvation from the sand4 could be found there. They’d probably just been humiliated by being caught up in a panicked stampede; herd mentalities were always embarrassing in hindsight. Slingshot had whispered a fervent prayer to Primus in the background while Ratchet worked, but maybe the Aerialbots had discovered religion while on Cybertron. And there might have been some shaking wings here, a whimper or two there, but repairs were sometimes painful and they _were_ in a crisis.

They weren’t afraid of him. Ratchet was a reasonable mech with a respectable reputation. One little slip wouldn’t collapse that.

They’d get over it. A day – two, tops – and it’d all be forgotten.

Right?

 

 

[* * * * *]  
Footnotes  
[* * * * *]

 

1Nobody crossed medical personnel. Or rather, they didn’t do it more than once. There was nothing quite so alarming as hearing _”Oops, sorry about that!”_ or _”Hmm. No, no, wait, I can fix this. I think.”_ during routine maintenance. Ratchet had spent a week fretting during regular maintenance on the Special Ops team, and they had resorted to stealing their own files from the medbay out of dread. And got caught swearing afterward, finding that files they’d just gone through the smelter to swipe were nothing but pithy commentary on how badly they abused Ratchet’s repair kit after missions. Ratchet’s tools remained untroubled there-after, as Jazz, Prowl, Red Alert, _and_ Optimus Prime all took turns putting them through the wringer over that bit of rule-breaking. The Medical Privacy Act was important to a _lot_ of Autobots, especially within such a small community as the _Ark_.

2Jazz had been heard to say in a rare, plaintive tone of voice that it’d be a lot funnier if they both weren’t dead serious about the whole thing. As it was, the rest of the Ark could tell how badly a meeting had gone by how unsettled the officers were afterward. Ratchet had the uncanny ability to counter security concerns with moral puzzles that left even Prime squirming in his seat.

3It involved wing flaps, a welding torch, Shockwave’s tower roof, and a soup can. A _full_ soup can. There had been a frantic scramble to remember whose berth was whose in the dead silence that followed that threat.

4Sand. As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, Cybertron got invaded by hostile sand. Suddenly Ratchet had a planet full of patients and two entire factions staring at him like he could heroically pull a cure out of his aft. It was a wonder he hadn’t snapped before this!


End file.
